Monday, 23 April 2007

Federico Herrero paints the columns that support the metro rails at Parque Berrio Station in the city of Medellin, Colombia.

read more about Medellin's recent transformation in New Left ReviewNew Left Review 44, March-April 2007

Medellin's Makeoverby Forrest HyltonTransformed from murder capital to corporate boom town, Medellín has been hailed as a rare urban success story for neo-conservatism in South America. The singular progression of Escobar and Uribe’s hometown—cattle-trading post, industrial centre, drug-trafficking hub, neoliberal Latin Mecca. In the face of a string of leftist successes in the Andes, with radical-populists elected in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the Right can boast one spectacular triumph. Medellín, the most conservative city in Colombia, the continent’s most conservative country, has been undergoing a dramatic boom for the past few years. Levels of high-rise construction now surpass those of Los Angeles and New York combined. Since 2002, the profusion of apartment towers, luxury hotels, supermarkets and shopping malls has been breathtaking. The country’s largest conglomerates and over seventy foreign enterprises now have their Colombian headquarters in Medellín, among them Phillip Morris, Kimberly Clark, Levi Strauss, Renault, Toyota and Mitsubishi. A 30,000 square-foot convention centre opened in 2005, and over a dozen international conferences have been held there annually, generating more than $100 million in investment and business deals. Medellín’s fashion industry is at present second only to São Paulo’s; its medical sector is a Latin American leader in organ transplants, aids and cancer research. An upscale museum-park complex in the city centre, replacing the old outdoor market and red-light district, houses the work of world-renowned Medellín artist, Fernando Botero, with his sculptures featured in an open-air setting...

Warhol films selected by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz and Christian RattemeyerFilms to be projected:Kiss (1963): Kiss is a series of 3 1/2 minute silent films of various people kissing: man & women, women &amp;amp;amp; women, man & man etc....Sleep (1963): Sleep, a 6-hour film of a man sleeping, belongs to Warhol's early film studies that emphasize stillness and duration.Empire (1964): A single shot of the Empire State Building over the course of one day.Blow Job (1964): a single 35-minute shot of a man's facial expressions as he receives the title act.Mario Banana (1964): also known as Mario Eats a Banana

with the support of Hotel Habita, Pablo Internacional Magazine and Iqons.com

Thursday, 12 April 2007

A small desalination device powered by solar energy is installed in a public school in Al Dhaid. It provides fresh drinking water for the students.

Although the main desalination plant in Sharjah City is intended to supply drinking water to all residents, in some parts of the city only salty water comes out of the drinking taps. The desalination plant runs on fossil fuels, reflecting the area's dependence on oil. In Sharjah, solar energy is only rarely used to create electricity.********

Obsession with water increases along with the consumption of it. Salty drinking water is dangerous for human health, and consuming it on a regular basis can be lethal. How then does one live in an environment where salty tap water is an everyday reality? Today, the Emirate ofSharjah has become a test site for answering this question. Although the main desalination plant in Sharjah City – part of the Sharjah Water and Electricity Authority – is intended to fresh deliver drinking water to all residents, not all of the supplied water is of the same quality. In some parts of the city, salty water still comes out of the drinking taps.

Traditionally – and long before there were any desalination plants – Sharjah obtained its water from underground aquifers and rainwater harvesting. Parts of the emirate still practice these traditional methods. However, a simple equation tells us that the more people there are who use the water, the less fresh water there is in the wells. Making matters worse, the water in the underground aquifers is becoming increasingly saline from overuse. People who can afford it install a reverse-osmosis (R.O.) desalination device in their homes to maintain the quality of their drinking water.

Especially schools, which are often situated a bit outside the city centre, have a problem with getting good quality drinking water from the tab. For the Sharjah Biennial 8, Marjetica Potrc will install a reverse-osmosis (R.O.) desalination device in a public school in Sharjah. This device will be connected to a solar panel and powered by solar energy. It will thus become a self-sustainable device, independent from the big desalination plants that run on fossil fuels– while these last.

Trained as an architect, Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc focuses in her mostly community-based projects on issues of self-sustainability, grown architecture and new building methods beyond the drawing-board. To exhibit other people’s designs is part of her artistic practice.

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...